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He was born to Camille, a French Catholic, and LeRoy Percy, of the planter class in Mississippi, and grew up in Greenville on the big river. His father was elected as US senator in 1910. As an attorney and planter with 20,000 acres under cultivation for cotton, he was very influential at the Episcopal university, Sewanee: The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, a postbellum tradition in his family. He spent a year in Paris before going to Harvard for a law degree. After returning to Greenville, Percy joined his father's firm in the practice of law.

Percy's family was plagued with suicides, including his first cousin LeRoy Pratt Percy and possibly his wife Phinizy, who died in an auto accident. William adopted his cousin's children, Walker, LeRoy (Roy) and Phinizy (Phin) Percy, after they were orphaned. As adults, all three prospered. Walker became a physician and a best-selling author. Roy married Sarah Hunt Farish, the daughter of Will Percy's law partner, Hazlewood Power Farish. He took charge of the Percy family plantation, Trail Lake. Phin married and moved to New Orleans to practice law.

Percy's most well-known work is his memoir, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1941). His other works include the text of "They Cast Their Nets in Galilee," which is included in the Episcopal Hymnal (1982) (Hymn 661), and the Collected Poems (Knopf 1943). One of his pieces was published under the name A.W. Percy in Men and Boys, an anonymous anthology of Uranian poetry (New York, 1934).

Percy was the playwright behind a one act scene in a volume of poetry "In April Once" (1920).

A friend of Herbert Hoover from the Belgium Relief Effort during the early years of World War I, Percy was put in charge of relief during the great flood of 1927, when an area larger than all New England (minus Maine) was inundated in the spring. During the flood, thousands of blacks fleeing farms and plantations under water sought refuge on the levee in Greenville. Percy believed that the refugees needed to be evacuated to Vicksburg to receive better care and food, and arranged for ships to prepare to remove them.

Percy, William Alexander (1941) Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son. Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-8071-0072-2. Reprinted with new introduction by Walker Percy, Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram (1994) The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510982-1